USD quarterback Josh Vander Maten (left) and SDSU quarterback Austin Sumner (center) are fixtures for their respective team's offense, but their stories entering a new season set them apart. / Joe Ahlquist / Argus Leader

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The Vander Maten file

Starts: Started all 11 games last year. Skills: Was one of the state of Iowa’s top two-sport athletes at Boyden Hull High School, earning first-team all-state and elite all-state honors as a football player. Was also first-team all-state as a point guard. Thumbprint: During a 1-10 season, Vander Maten showed flashes of star potential. Coaches would like to see him take advantage of his physical gifts with better judgment this season. Starts: 20 career. Skills: At Brandon Valley, broke 14 school and eight state records; Finished third for the Jerry Rice award given to the top freshmen in the FCS. Thumbprint: Sumner’s passing statistics suffered slightly after a thumb injury. Still, the junior is on track to set the school record for career passing years this season.

AT A GLANCE

A look at USD quarterback Josh Vander Maten’s career stats:

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VERMILLION — Determination and resolve have never failed Josh Vander Maten to this point in his athletic career. It is why, despite enduring frustration and failure a year ago, that there’s no danger of him giving up.

The 6-foot-2, 215-pound quarterback, who was all-state in both football and basketball at Boyden-Hull with college suitors in both sports, was a walk-on at USD. Beyond that, with excellent speed, a lot of the football programs wanted him as a safety or a receiver. He decided on the Coyotes with the assurance that he’d get a chance to figure things out at QB.

Going into the his fourth year in the program and his second season as a starter, the Coyotes know – and no doubt an academic all-conference player like Vander Maten knows – that improvement as a team needs to include improvement at quarterback.

To that end, he went in search of the little things. Getting faster and stronger? Those are big things, and Vander Maten proved he was taking care of himself in those categories by running a 4.38 40-yard sprint on the turf at the Dome this offseason. This improvement process had to go beyond the fitness tests associated with football.

“I wanted to get in the weight room and improve my core strength and really work on my throwing,” Vander Maten said. “I worked a lot on my footwork, getting out there and getting set-up. I worked on the little things, every little thing. All the things that could get overlooked – that was my goal.”

A year ago in his first as a starter, Vander Maten threw for 1,662 yards, completing 151 of 268 passes (56 percent). He also ran for 495 yards and six touchdowns. It was promising in many ways considering he was playing behind a new line, but there were down days mixed in where missed opportunities were conspicuous.

“Big plays are game-changers and they need to happen,” Vander Maten said. “It’s something we want to get better at and we want to be able to do more consistently this season.”

Skills showing through

The stats came within the context of a season littered with struggles on the offensive side of the ball. As the squad prepares for what it hopes is a dramatic improvement in the win column, part of the source of optimism is based on their multi-tooled quarterback’s capacity to bedevil defenses with a good year.

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“I’ve had three different quarterbacks take me to a national championship game,” coach Joe Glenn said this week. “They were all brilliant people. And Josh is brilliant. They could all throw and they could run and they were all great leaders. But none of them had the whole package like Josh has.”

Ask Vander Maten to talk about himself and he responds with little. Not the case when talking about the team. It’s how he’s decided to approach quarterbacking a college football team that has made increased chemistry a huge priority after a season that had heartbreaking losses hitting them at every turn.

“The team chemistry and the ‘brothership’ of being around each other is light years better than it was last year,” Vander Maten said. “And anyone who knows football knows that’s invaluable. The linemen worked their butts off in the weight room, they did everything possible to get themselves ready to play football this year. Getting a year experience is huge for a quarterback, but even more so for a lineman.”

Motivated to succeed

After playing on football and basketball teams in high school that rarely lost, last year was a definite change of pace. A lot of players took the losses hard and nobody took them harder than the quarterback.

“Josh offers a sense of competitiveness that is unmatched,” said offensive coordinator Wes Beschorner, a former USD great at that position who has since groomed former Coyote standouts Noah Shepard and Dante Warren at QB.

“He wants to be successful almost to a fault, but he has very high standards for himself and that’s a good thing. Every day, in team sessions or individual sessions, Josh is giving it his all. People see that and it means something. He’s not a rah-rah guy but he doesn’t need to be.”

But he does need to win the eternal battle with frustration. That’s a difficult task at times for the highly motivated.

“When he wasn’t playing the way he wanted to, it got to him a little bit,” Beschorner said. “It wasn’t just one guy, but as a quarterback you know you can be the difference in a game. If you’re that much better prepared and that much more ready, you can be the difference and you have to get comfortable with that.”

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Beschorner laughed when asked about how much better Vander Maten and the rest of the offense has looked this year in fall camp compared to last year at this time.

Part of that has to with the offensive line that has more experience, but there’s no question a lot of it has to do with Vander Maten, the player in the Coyote offense who has the best opportunity to be the difference-maker.

“Josh is able to expect things now more than just reacting to things,” said junior receiver Terrance Terry, who along with the departed Will Powell was a main target last year. “Last year a lot of us were just getting our feet wet and starting to understand what this level of college football was all about.”